Like most people, we have a love-hate relationship with spam filters on email. Nobody wants their inbox full of junk, but we’ve all experienced situations where emails have accidentally ended up in the spam folder when you needed to receive them.
Unfortunately that means it may happen to your brand’s marketing emails you’re sending out too. Fortunately, there’s some easy steps you can follow that make it more likely that your messages will land in your customer’s inboxes.
Here’s what to do:
Use A Branded Email Address
We know. We love gmail and the like too – but they are red flags to spam filters. If you are going to be sending emails out on behalf of your brand you need to use a “domain email address” (e.g. all of ours come from an @greenfish.com.au email). This is because while the free email clients are great tools for your personal correspondence, the fact that anyone can create one anytime without any credentials means they’re what a lot of the spammers use too.
If you are currently running your business from a free email client like gmail, don’t despair. When you upgrade to an @yourdomain.com email, you can set up forwards to help make the transition easier for you and your customers.
Get Permission To Email People
This is an important step we see miss all the time. It’s also a legal grey area but a lot of marketers assume they’re allowed to email (or text) people just because they gave their details during an enquiry or transaction. While this interpretation may technically hold some truth, it doesn’t mean dumping your whole database of every email you’ve ever collected into a send is the right thing to do (or will be successful).
Compliance with spam laws isn’t the same as getting past email spam filters, so always ensure your customers opt into receiving your communications, use both a welcome and a sunset series in your email marketing flows and don’t bury your unsubscribe links so they’re hard to find either. This ensures you’re only sending your messages to your most engaged customers and this increases the likelihood that your emails will get sent and seen.
Use A High Rated Email Marketing Software Provider
Email marketing clients like Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign and some of the other more reputable providers will help get your emails into inboxes instead of being buried in spam. These providers actually work with some of the bigger names in email like gmail, Yahoo mail, Microsoft etc so have inbuilt features and functionality that ensure those systems recognise the email as something safe to deliver to their users.
While many eCommerce and website building platforms also “do” email marketing, they’re not built for that and sadly it can show in your results. Luckily it’s really easy to integrate and automate your sales tools like Shopify with a system such as Klaviyo to give you and your customers a streamlined experience, with better results too.
Don’t Write Spammy Copy
There are some key words and phrases that are likely to get your emails flagged as spam. Think about the purpose of spam emails. They’re sending out mass emails hoping to swindle people in some way, so they use all the usual suspects like “free” “act now” “buy now” “earn money” and other phrases along those lines.
Obviously they’re also words you may be weaving into your email content or subject lines. It’s not that you can’t use them at all, it’s just that you need to be strategic about how and when you do.
For example, sending someone a “Free Gift If You Act Now” as a subject line on an email for the first time is likely to get you flagged. Sending someone who has previously engaged positively with your emails a time sensitive reward or incentive won’t. It’s all about what you say, when and how you say it a lot of the time.
!!!!!DON’T DO THIS!!!!!
Especially not in your subject line. Excessive capital letters and/or punctuation are going to make those spam filters swoop in so quickly and your email results will suffer for it. There are some creative ways you can create urgency, incorporate “cool” elements like emojis (we feel like we explained that in a very uncool way) and otherwise be more relatable to your audience but it needs to be done strategically to ensure that your emails land in inboxes and don’t end up caught up in the junk folder.
Let Us Tell You What To Do
Greenfish Marketing is offering a free 20min Strategy Call with our email marketing experts. This isn’t just a sales plug for our services, it’s an interactive session where we give you actionable information and steps. Reserve your time here.
